


Savior

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Brock Rumlow is a dick, Brock Rumlow is too awful to acknowledge his special gay feelings, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Extremely Dubious Consent, HYDRA Trash Party, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mild Gore, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Stockholm Syndrome, Xenophobia, brock rumlow's fragile masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-02 14:05:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14546328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “I could have taken that shot,” Brunner mumbles as they start to get up.Innes snorts, voice lower. “I’m sure you’d be good at takingallthe things the soldier does.”





	1. Chapter 1

It’s the utter dumbness of the way he’s going to die, that’s what pisses Rumlow off the most.

 

* * *

 

The idiots behind him are talking quietly and they think Rumlow can’t hear.

They’re planted belly-down in a layer of crunchy snow on the cold ground, Rumlow in front and the other two behind him. They’re facing west, a position that would be uncomfortable at this time of day if it wasn’t for the thick cloud cover blocking the mid-afternoon sunset. Rumlow can see well enough, past the trees on the slight downward slope in front of them and past the length of snow around the compound: down there, a single guard is currently doing his rounds outside the fence. He looks as miserable as Rumlow feels. The snow is coming down only slowly, in big fluffy harmless-looking flakes, but the wind is colder than Satan's dick and relentless: all around, this is one of the less pleasurable things Rumlow has done this year. The two moron kids behind him are making it much worse.

“…Russians drag us out all the way out here when they’ve got their own HYDRA base like fifty miles away,” one of them is saying. Brunner, the dark-haired annoying one. “They need to learn to do their own shit, stop making the Americans pick up their—”

“Did you not listen to anything they said,” hisses the other, slightly less annoying one. Innes, his name is. Blond; something about him always reminds Rumlow of a rat. “The guys in this compound are monitoring the HYDRA base near here. They’ve tapped into their video system or some shit, and they don’t know that the base has figured that out yet. If the people in here are watching their video feed and they see anything weird happening with the Russians at the HYDRA base, they’ll get suspicious and…”

“So hire some locals and put them in masks for the video feed.”

“Then they’d have to kill them afterward.”

“What’s your point?” Brunner exhales. “Just don’t drag us to this frozen piece of—”

“Maybe the reason they dragged us here is that they want us to get some practice,” Rumlow says. “So that dumb fucks like you can learn to stop having pointless conversations when we are about to invade the compound of a fucking HYDRA splinter group.”

The voices are replaced by intimidated silence.

Rumlow is not going to do anything else to them right now, though, and they all know it. They’re at a good distance, and the wind is blowing towards them, so their voices are an annoyance, not a danger. He knows that this is dull, and cold, _fucking_ cold, and they have been here for half an hour already, but for god’s sake, it’s like listening to high school kids.

Silence for a while. There’s the low sound of the wind, and the occasional soft rustling as one of them shifts in the polyester camouflage gear they’ve got on over their clothes. The guard they’re watching looks bored too, but Rumlow figures that he would most definitely take boredom over what is about to happen to him, unless his life _really_ sucks. They lie there, waiting for the signal. The guard paces, not knowing that he is being watched and that he is about to die. He looks sloppy, probably a local hire rather than a long-term HYDRA true believer. The rest of the defenses don’t look much better. The men who adapted this building and its surroundings into a makeshift compound did at least cut down trees around the perimeter and put up a decent fence, but that and the guards at front and back seem to be the extent of their security. And who the hell chooses a location that’s at the bottom of an incline on two sides? They are _asking_ for the real HYDRA to come slaughter him.

This is what happens when nerds think they’re too clever, he thinks. Teplov and the other morons in the splinter group obviously figured they were so smart, stealing intel and spying on the people they used to work for, and didn’t realize they sucked at so many other things. Rumlow doesn’t even know what this guy’d been planning on _doing_ out here. Trying to build up his numbers so he could start a coup? Infiltration campaign? All they’d told him was that Teplov had decided he knew better than his higher-ups, and that he’d dropped some hints about going public with a lot shit earlier than HYDRA had planned. The Russians at the base might have even made that last part up in an effort to get this mission approved. He doesn’t particular care if they did.

“I’m fucking freezing,” Brunner, the less rat-like one, is talking again, because apparently he has a death wish too. “Hurry the fuck up, Winter.”

“Don’t call him that,” Rumlow mutters.

“Sorry, sir,” he says. “Just wish he’d go ahead and start already.”

“When he’s ready,” Innes says.

“It’s an easy shot,” Brunner says. “Bet I could take it.”

Innes shushes him. It’s slightly too forceful; he is trying to toady up to Rumlow, like always. “You couldn’t even get within a hundred feet of that guard without tripping over your feet and alerting everyone. You’d manage to somehow set off an air-raid siren.”

And as if to highlight the difference between Brunner and the guy who is _actually doing something right now_ , there’s a distant thud. The guard at the rear of the compound meeting his end, presumably. The other guard, the one they’re looking at now, doesn’t react, and yes, in this wind it’s a noise you wouldn’t pay attention to unless you were looking out for it, but this guy _should_ be looking out for it. Definitely not HYDRA’s best.

“Whatever,” Brunner says from behind Rumlow, not impressed. “Now get here before we all get frostbite, Winter.”

“For god’s sake,” says Innes. “Winter is a girl’s name. My friend’s _niece_ is called Winter.”

He doesn’t speak and Rumlow can’t see his face, but Rumlow can _sense_ the way Brunner opens his mouth to make a joke about that particular subject, and then wisely stops. There are a few seconds of uncomfortable silence.

The guard below them turns, bracing himself against the cold and the increasingly heavy snowfall, and then there is a cracking noise and his forehead explodes in a spray of red, his body thudding to the ground like a dropped toy.

“I could have taken that shot,” Brunner mumbles as they start to get up.

Innes snorts, voice lower. “I’m sure you’d be good at taking _all_ the things the soldier does.”

“Fucking spread out already,” Rumlow says, and the other two jump and do it. They don’t speak again, and the next part goes so unbelievably well that when it turns into a shitshow later, it seems like cosmic justice.

 

* * *

 

Teplov is dead, caught by one of the first bullets of the firefight inside the building. Or more than one bullet, likely, because most of his head is gone. Two dozen other men also dead by the time the rest of the place is cleared, no casualties on their side. The survivors had fled to a reinforced safe room at the back of the building, but there is a problem you face when you are constructing a secret compound on the fly in the middle of Siberia: it’s hard to get your hands on the best building materials. Two or three kicks from the soldier and the metal doors to the room had caved in, revealing a bunch of raised hands and some pleading in Russian which had soon turned, with some confusion, to broken English. These people they rounded up instead of executing, although Rumlow suspected that most of them would start wishing very soon after they got back to the real HYDRA base that they had chosen a clean bullet to the head instead. Ah well, wasn’t his business.

He should be glad about their lack of casualties, but all he can think about is how warm it is in this building, even with holes all over the place.

Off to his right, a couple of the nerds on the team are fiddling with some computers and sliding files into boxes. Closer to him, the soldier is standing over Teplov’s dead body, gazing down at the open hole that used to be a face. Rumlow steps closer, because he is not needed for anything else right now and because he thinks he knows why the soldier is looking.

Up close, the guy’s shot-out head kind of reminds Rumlow of a cheesecake, the type with glazed strawberries on top. God, he’s hungry.

Next to him, the soldier crouches down over the body. He turns the remains-of-a-head to the left and then to the right, frowning. Lifts one of the limp arms, pulls off the black leather glove Teplov had been wearing and stares at the fingers. As Rumlow watches, the soldier produces a knife from somewhere on his body, brings it to the bare hand, and slices the index and middle fingers off as easily as you’d cut through an apple.

Christ, he really _is_ hungry. The soldier wraps the fingers in the glove and puts them in the pocket of his camouflage jacket.

“Probably no fingerprints, if he’s ex-HYDRA,” Rumlow says. “Any teeth still in attached to a jaw in there?”

The soldier shakes his head. He probes the inside head with his metal fingers, as if he really wants to be sure, then shakes his head again.

“You’re thinking it too, huh,” Rumlow says.

The soldier looks up at him and nods. Even in here, with the electricity still on and the room bright and still wearing his snow camouflage gear from outside, he seems to have a way of fading into the background like he’s in the shadow. Rumlow is stupidly proud of himself for being able to tell what he’s thinking at all.

“Yeah,” Rumlow says, “too easy.”

The soldier nods again, silent. There is still-unmelted snow stuck in his hair, and _thank god_ there is no way for anyone else to know that Rumlow had just noticed that.


	2. Chapter 2

The files and computers go in the first vehicle. The soldier goes in the second with Innes and the prisoners, because he will be able to shut down any escape attempts or rescues, unlikely as either of those things is. Honestly, to Rumlow it seems like mechanical trouble is more likely: the vehicles they’re using, loaned from the local HYDRA base and aspirationally labeled “armored cars,” don’t actually contain much armor and apparently have not been updated since the Soviet era. Usually they’d perform a more thorough demolition of the compound, but they’ve stripped it of anything important and the weather is getting worse by the minute, so it’s something the Russians can deal with later.

_Almost_ everything important, that is. Rumlow wishes he could avoid the next part, but the soldier had been right: There is a chance that Teplov wasn’t _that_ stupid after all. If he really had used some poor bastard as a decoy body and is still breathing, this is likely the best chance they'll have to catch him. Otherwise they’ll have to track him down and kill him some other way, and if that means staying longer in this shithole, he’ll take a night of discomfort outside.

There is only one usable road out of the compound at this time of year, which is another tally mark in the _the people who built this place are stupid_ category, but it makes their job easier. Rumlow parks the vehicle at the side of the road at a respectable distance, Brunner climbs into the back to get their extra gear, and then they trek a short way back towards the compound. The near-full moon and snow means there’s some visibility despite the thick cloud cover, and they set up behind the treeline by the side of the road and wait.

Back on the ground and the snow, and somehow now that it’s dark it has managed to drop fifteen degrees since sunset. He didn’t know that the temperature scales even _went_ fifteen degrees lower. He is wearing thick synthetic layers under his snow camo, he’s put on a balaclava and ballistic goggles, and the drawcord on the hood of his camo jacket is pulled so tight it feels claustrophobic, but the wind finds its way in anyway.

“I’m fucking freezing,” Brunner says after about ten minutes, and Rumlow is about to tell him to shut up and stop complaining when he realizes that Brunner isn’t talking to him. He’s repeating it to himself, under his breath. _“I’m fucking freezing, I’m fucking freezing.”_

Rumlow doesn’t scold him: he is freezing too. They are dressed right, they’ve set up here right, but _that fucking wind_ and he is pretty sure the gear they were issued is designed for Russians, who probably have some freakish genetic mutation or something that helps them deal with this, because Rumlow is not exactly from a tropical climate himself and right now he is so cold he wants to die.

They sit still. It’s _barely evening_ local time and he has no idea what time his body thinks it is, but at least the cold is keeping him awake. He doesn’t want to be hunting some asshole over a frozen hellscape for the next two weeks if this guy gets away, but then again he doesn’t want his dick to freeze off either, so—

A noise, low and droning, over the wind. And a point light: moving erratically, too erratically for a car. At first he thinks the person coming from the direction of the compound is running with a flashlight, and the noise was a coincidence, but that’s due to his brain being frozen; the noise is some sort of snowmobile. Probably Teplov had had it hidden in the woods somewhere. Clever, although this man’s cleverness doesn’t extend to avoiding the road.

Well, if the guy was that smart he wouldn’t have betrayed HYDRA in the first place. Next to him, Brunner lowers his head to the rifle scope.

Rumlow says: “You got it?”

“Of course, sir,” he says. The snowmobile is approaching, and Teplov is going to wear out the carbides on that thing by driving it like this, but he’ll be dead within ten seconds so Rumlow supposes he won’t mind.

He will be dead, and they will be warm. The crack of the rifle right next to his head is almost pleasant; the man is dead now, and—

The droning noise keeps going.

“I missed, sir.”

_No shit._ “You going to write a novel about it? Fire again!”

Another crack. The snowmobile keeps approaching. It’s not even going that fast.

“I’m sorry, sir, my fingers—I can’t stop shaking and—”

“You’re fucking _nervous_? You told me you were _good_ at this.”

“It’s the cold, sir, I can’t—”

For fuck’s sake. Rumlow should have kept the soldier here and just shot those prisoners on the spot, interrogation opportunities be damned.

With that thought, the single headlight whips past them, and there isn’t time. “Just give me that,” he growls and grabs the rifle, and the idiot next to him pushes himself to his feet and staggers after him as he sprints to the car. “You drive, moron," Rumlow says.“ _I’ll_ shoot. Or are you too cold to drive as well?”

Brunner is wise enough not to answer, just runs round to the driver side of the armored car. Rumlow gets in the passenger side, and a second later the engine starts—he thanks god both for the vehicle still working and for this moron actually being able to drive it—and after one or two false starts in the snow they pull out.

At least Brunner’s driving is better than his shooting. It’s less than a minute before they see the light again in the distance. Rumlow opens the window, leans out, yanks his goggles off. The light gets bigger, the wind whips at his face as he leans out, and he aims the rifle and fires. Misses.

Damn. If Brunner says a fucking word in comparison, when he is shooting from a _moving vehicle_ —

But Brunner is silent, hands on the wheel, white and terrified. Rumlow aims again, waiting for the right time, for the right moment in his own breathing. The man ahead of them knows what they’re trying to do and is trying to get off the road, but the verge here is too steep on one side and the incline too high on the other. They’re approaching a curve, though, and he can already see the terrain flattens out a little after that.

He feels Brunner press on the accelerator, too damn fast with all the snow on the road but they’re _almost there_ , and the curve is coming up, and he is close enough now have a good view of the back of the man on the snowmobile, lit up in the headlights, just as the man looks over his shoulder at them. Teplov, definitely, alive and well.

Rumlow aims—exhales—fires and finally, _finally_ , the figure jerks to the side and the snowmobile moves from under him, the body bouncing off to the side and disappearing amongst the trees.

And then Brunner, the idiot, decelerates right as they are hitting the curve, and now they are going to die as well.

The truck seems to slide on the snow for hours, long enough for him to curse every one of Brunner’s ancestors, and every one of his own for trusting a new guy to do anything, and then it is turning, slowly it seems, upside down, enough time for Rumlow to think that of course he hadn’t put a seatbelt on when chasing a guy on a snowmobile and maybe he should have, but then there’s a crunch and he doesn’t think anymore.

 

* * *

 

He is going to die, and it’s not going to be quick or noble.

His right side is pinned between the seat and the passenger-side door, which is a foot further to the left than it should have been. The metal is curved inward, trapping him, but his back is still against the seat and his head throbs but apart from that there is no pain, which probably is not a good thing. The headlights are still on, lighting up the dark forest in front of him like a snow globe.

He turns his head. The windshield is gone, and Brunner is gone, and it doesn’t take an investigative team to figure out what happened there.

“Brunner,” he calls out. His lungs still work. Nothing. Rumlow swears. Way to _continue fucking it up_ , kid.

He leans his head back against the seat. The truck had landed upright after flipping, which is something, he supposes, and he hadn’t been thrown out. The rifle is nowhere in sight, and doesn’t seem to have impaled him anywhere. His head feels pretty clear, considering—he is shaking, but that’s to be expected. He just needs to get out of the vehicle: find the snowmobile—maybe it had survived—and try to find better shelter. If the leg is broken or crushed he will deal. What matters is getting out before he dies of exposure.

He snakes is right arm out from between the seat and the newly positioned door easily enough. Then he steels himself for pain, and tries to move his leg. Nothing. The limb is trapped tight, and when he braces his hands against the seat and tries to wrench it sideways by force, the skin above his knee tears— something jagged is piercing him under all that metal. Glass, maybe, or something in the door that had buckled and split. These Russian trucks seemed to have about as much integrity as an aluminum coke can, so not surprising.

He pauses to breathe. Snow is flowing in through the hole where the windshield used to be and dusting his clothing, his face.

Rumlow grits his teeth and tries again, gets nothing but a new gouge in his thigh. Wetness soaking through the three layers of clothing he has on down there, and he bites down on the inside of his cheek with the pain, but the fact that he can still feel his leg is good, and he can still think, and from what he can tell his internal organs have not been damaged, and—

He’s still completely fucked, if he can’t get out.

The others will be too far away for his short-range radio. There’s a bigger radio in the back of the vehicle, but fortune has not put it within reach, or anywhere that he can see it. The men will come back for him, but only after Rumlow has been gone long enough for them to decide to go back out and investigate, and he will be here for hours and hours and this night is fucking long—best-case scenario he only gets frostbite, worst-case—

“Fuck,” he says. The blood on his leg is cold now, and enough of the clothing down there has been ripped that the exposure stings like a knife. He is also sweating from the pain, which is just fucking great. He is determined not to get weepy about this, but _fuck_ if he doesn’t want to strangle that stupid kid and this stupid shitty truck and his stupid leg.

He moves again, angry now, tries to kick and shove himself free but all that does is hurt more, and the icy air is painful in his throat. He’s going to die in the cold in some shitty part of the world and it is going to be slow and awful and—

There is another sound, over the wind.

Rumlow turns, but pinned like this he has trouble seeing anything except more of the ruined vehicle. It’s an engine noise, coming from behind him on the road but still too far away to identify. It could be the snowmobile again—he hadn’t been able to confirm that kill, for obvious reasons—but the noise seems to be heading toward him. It’s hard to tell over the wind, but it’s getting louder. Try as he might, he can’t tell if it’s coming from the base they just left or the other direction. If it’s the former, and it’s someone else who had survived other than Teplov, maybe he’ll get a quick death after all.

The sound gets louder as Rumlow makes an attempt to reach his sidearm where it’s strapped against his right leg. He pushes his arm back down to where his leg is trapped, but the holster is pinched against the metal of the door. The vehicle slows somewhere out of Rumlow's view, comes to a stop. It’s idling.

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ …” He should have had the gun in his hand already, instead of lying here complaining to himself about how cold he was. Idiot. Clearly the others in his team have been rubbing off on him.

The engine keeps idling as his hand tries to dig for a better grip on the pistol, like they’re taking their time, fucking with him. He can’t hear anything else over that noise and the wind. The holster relents, finally, and he yanks on the weapon and then stops when he sees the figure outside the open window.

It’s dark, and he doesn’t have a great view, but he’d recognize that stupid hair anywhere.

“ _Soldier_ ,” he says, and wants to kiss him, which is something he’s never wanted to do before.

The soldier grabs the crush of metal pinning him and pulls, and whatever jagged thing was caught on his leg rips out as well, and Rumlow screams.

 

* * *

 

Back in the vehicle is when he starts to get worried.

The prisoners are still there, lined up on the bench seat on the opposite side to where Rumlow is lying. Innes is in back now as well, his eyes on the prisoners, with Hennessy driving. Rumlow has his head propped up on a bag, and is trying to will himself not to shake as the soldier busies himself with his leg. The man is kneeling on the floor of the truck next to him, and has torn a larger hole in the layers Rumlow is wearing—his camo, his pants, the long underwear underneath—to get a look at the wound. Something warm presses down painfully against the most painful spot, and Rumlow bites his lip.

“I have to apply pressure,” the soldier says over the sound of the engine.

“I’m fine,” Rumlow snaps. “Did you find Brunner?”

“Dead.” The soldier says it like he is giving a particular dull weather report. “Near the vehicle. Cervical fracture severed his spinal cord.”

Huh, served him right. “How about Teplov?”

“He was injured. In the snow. I completed the mission.”

He would usually praise him for that, but the soldier’s human hand is still pressed into his thigh—a place on his body he can easily reach himself—and Rumlow had already told him he was _fine_ , and he is getting annoyed. “Soldier, let go. I’m fine. Watch the prisoners.”

The soldier ignores him. His hand remains pressed on his thigh, and he doesn’t move.

_What the fuck._

Rumlow flicks his eyes over to where Innes is sitting. He is pretending to be watching the prisoners, but he isn’t really.

He looks back at the soldier. He could try to shove his hand off by force, but that will achieve nothing unless the soldier _lets_ it achieve something, and he doesn’t want his one of his men to see their commander being pinned down against his will. He decides to pretend for now that he doesn’t mind after all. The hand is warm, at least. The cut on his thigh is the only part of his body that doesn't still feel like ice.

The remaining euphoria of realizing he wasn’t going to die tonight is quickly bleeding out. The reality of the situation is coming into focus more: the vehicle they’re in isn’t even supposed to be here right now. Something is fucked up.

“Kid,” he says, turning to Innes, and trying to sound commanding even though his teeth are chattering and a man with a metal arm is molesting his leg. “Explain what the hell happened. Why’d you come back? You were supposed to hit the base before the weather got worse.”

The kid glances at the soldier, who is ignoring their conversation, or pretending to, and back at Rumlow. “We—the soldier said, we’d be better off waiting down the road. So we waited, and then he said we should go back and check.”

“And mess up the ambush.” Rumlow winces. The soldier has moved, a little, but now he is wrapping something around his leg. Not a tourniquet, which is a good sign, he supposes.

“He said he heard shots,” Innes said. “We were just down the road, sir.” Innes doesn’t have to elaborate. He can tell by the kid’s face neither he nor the driver had had any say in the matter. Innes looks more pissed off about this than scared.

“Did he hurt or threaten anyone?” Rumlow tries not to wince again as the vehicle jolts and the soldier grips down more.

“He, uh, pulled Hennessy out of his seat, sir.”

“He did what?”

“Hennessy was driving,” he says. “The soldier told us we should stop and wait it out and Hennessy said he wouldn’t stop because we were supposed to go back to the base, and the soldier grabbed Hennessy and put him back here with me and then the soldier drove, sir.”

He cranes his head as far as he can to look at Hennessy, who is either out of hearing range or pretending not to hear. This is… not good. Technically it’s not over the line for the soldier to make a call like that, but that combined with him ignoring Rumlow’s direct order…

He would ask the soldier for an explanation, but if he doesn’t answer it will make things look even worse. Something to deal with later.

Innes is looking at him warily, like he is waiting for Rumlow to explode and is preparing excuses. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rumlow says, and the kid nods. The vehicle jolts again, but it hurts less this time.

It’s quiet after that. Innes keeps looking at them, eyes flicking away from the prisoners to look at the soldier, and then the hand on Rumlow's leg. At first it just seems like curiosity, but when Rumlow gets a better look at him—easy, lean your head back, pretend to close your eyes—the gaze when he looks at the soldier is more like a cat looking into a fish tank.

Huh. Maybe _this_ was the ulterior motive for all that sucking up Innes has been doing. That’s a new one. Rumlow hasn’t had anyone react to the rumors with jealousy before, but there’s a first time for everything. And it’s not like the kid is going to try anything: the soldier would rip his spine out.

The pain dulls but doesn’t fade as the drive progresses. One of the prisoners cries, and Innes tells him to shut up, and when he doesn’t, hits him with the butt of his rifle. Innes seems to enjoy it a little bit too much—laughing that much is just excessive, and you can't interrogate someone as easily if they have a skull fracture—but whatever. Rumlow asks the soldier if there’s any food, and he shakes his head and says: “You shouldn't eat. You might need surgery.”

Fuck.

They had radioed the base on the way home, and a medical team is waiting with a gurney. That’s just embarrassing, and he refuses it: once the soldier has helped him out of the vehicle, he walks instead. Or tries to: he can put weight on the leg, but it turns out his blood is all over his clothes and the truck instead of in his head, and he sways. The soldier props him up before he makes a fool out of himself and faints like a fucking girl.

“Please take the gurney,” someone says above him.

Russian accent. Rumlow is sitting on the floor. Where did the soldier go? How long has he been sitting here?

“You are in shock, sir, please.”

Someone is there, moving him, and he doesn’t resist. The Russian accent belongs to a woman who now looms above him. “We must take you to the medical wing,” the voice says, and he is on his back. The gurney is already moving, and it makes his stomach lurch.

“It’s a fucking gash on my leg,” Rumlow says. “I don’t need admitting. Just get someone to stitch me up.”

“Sir,” she says delicately, “You were in a serious accident. We must at least observe—”

“Fuck off,” he says. “I know what you guys do to injured Americans who you’re _observing_.” He’ll probably wake up with a new head or a metal dick or something.

She looks affronted, but otherwise ignores him. And maybe they’re right about it being worse than he thought, because he doesn’t get up and punch her. The gurney is very comfortable.

Stay awake. He must admit, the pain is getting worse now. The doctor is probing at his leg like a goddamn torturer, and a man is cutting at his snow camo with scissors, while another woman appears with a needle. “Antibiotics,” she says.

More probing; he stops them with some particularly imaginative threats before they use those scissors to cut his pants and shirt off as well. Fucking perverts. Another needle.

“Tetanus,” she says. He doesn’t want to look at what she is doing. Another needle, too late to stop, but this one isn’t just _pain_ , it’s a weird cold shakiness spreading through his body…

“What the fuck was that,” he says. For the second time today, he deeply regrets separating himself from the soldier. Then again, would he even be any help? As far as Rumlow knew, the soldier had never been stored at this particular base—he’d been at a freaky underground one about 200 miles to the northeast of here—but even still, these people probably knew code words to make him shut himself down or punch everyone to death or something.

Fucking Russians. He had never trusted them, HYDRA or not.

“For pain,” the woman with the needle is saying. Things are getting blurry, and he keeps eye contact with her. He won’t let them—

But the dizzy sensation fades, although his body still feels jittery and heavy, and when the doctor starts manhandling his leg again, the pain has faded. The heaviness is turning pleasant. He is still cold.

“You don’t just inject me with your shit without asking me first,” he says regardless, keeping his voice steady. “I don’t know what bullshit drugs you people think are normal—”

The doctor acts as if he hasn’t spoken. She is a little bit rougher with the stitches than he thinks she needs to be.

Awake. For fuck's sake, just stay awake...

 


	3. Chapter 3

Four hours later, they let him go.

It’s around midnight, and Rumlow is lucid and okay. He has a mild concussion and a list of other things that he can barely remember, but he can move his limbs and breathe and so he is _definitely_ okay to leave. It takes arguing, and threats of violence, and finally simply ripping the IV out of his arm and getting up, but he convinces the medical staff of this, too.

“I’m fine, I’m walking just fine, see,” he says to the doctor, a tall skinny guy who had replaced the woman at the end of her shift.

“You’re on a _lot_ of morphine,” the doctor says, sounding unimpressed. “You could be walking without noticing if your bones were broken.”

“Are they?”

“No.”

“Then fuck off.” He takes another step, then stops. “Does anyone have a safety pin so I can fasten my fucking pants?”

Someone helps him pin together the hole in his pants, and he pulls on the jacket he'd been wearing under his camo. It had been pretty much destroyed when they cut it off him, but it’ll be enough to get him back to the barracks without freezing.

He must admit that he starts to doubt his decision when he is halfway back to the barracks building that the team is being put up in. The base isn’t huge, but it’s _very very_ cold, and right now the distance seems like a lot, and his leg—it’s not pain exactly, not anymore, but it feels _wrong_ , tense and swollen under the remains of his long underwear. Everything else just feels… off.

Morphine. Right, _sure_. This is some weird-ass foreign version of morphine, he knows it. Normal morphine wouldn’t fuck him up this bad.

He keeps going, even though all of the warmth he’d gained when he was inside seems to be leaving his body already. He’s not stupid, despite what the medical personnel must think of him now. He knows the injury to his leg is bad, that it’s more than just the cut on his thigh, that it is going to hurt more tomorrow and that he might be out of commission for a while. He is perfectly willing to get more medical treatment when he requires it. Just not from _them_. He can walk: it can wait.

Hennessy is inside, sitting on a table that’s been pushed against the wall next to the entrance, leaning against the wall and looking exhausted. His eyes go wide when he sees Rumlow.

Rumlow ignores that. “Fischer set you up on watch?”

“Until 2 o'clock, sir. Then Innes taking over. All your stuff is in room 3 upstairs, sir.”

He nods. Good. His second-in-command doesn’t trust the weirdos on this base either. And he clearly doesn’t trust the soldier to perform his usual guard duty when he's around so many Russians, which is a good call.

The stairs are hell, but apparently they don’t have elevator technology in this part of the world yet. By the time he gets upstairs and to the door with the 3 on it he is sweating, like his body is reacting to pain that he can’t feel. It must be that: he’s certainly not sweating because he’s hot. It’s warm in here, but he still feels the cold down to his bones.

But still. Indoors is good. Freedom is good. Being alive is good.

The room is small. The main light is off, although the fluorescent light panel over the twin bed is still glowing. Rumlow’s bag and gear are by the foot of the bed, and the soldier is sitting on the ancient-looking armchair in the opposite corner. When he sees Rumlow, he slips the pistol he’d been holding into his ankle holster in a movement that is more fluent and graceful than anything involving an ankle holster should be, and then stands up.

“I don’t need help,” Rumlow says when the soldier makes as if to step forward. He limps across the small patch of floor to the bed. The mattress creaks as he sits down—nothing in this base _isn’t_ ancient, apparently. But having the weight off his leg, with the promise of not moving for a while finally stretching in front of him, is more pleasurable than he had expected. He’ll admit: weirdness aside, these are some _effective_  drugs. “You eat?”

The soldier nods. He is out of his gear and is wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, so he has been washed, as well. For the first time in his life Rumlow almost wishes someone would do the same to him: it’s going to be a bitch to shower.

A grab on his arm interrupts the thought. The soldier is _there,_ even though Rumlow had told him he didn’t need it, kneeling down on the floor next to him now, pulling on his ruined jacket like he's trying to help Rumlow get it off. “Fuck off. I’m fine,” Rumlow says, and when the soldier ignores him _again_ and keeps pulling: “I said _fuck off_ , you brain-damaged freak.”

A hurt look flashes across the soldier’s face before it goes blank again. Or almost blank: he gets the feeling that somehow, beneath that, the soldier is glaring at him. Rumlow gets that feeling more and more these days, actually. How is he the only person in the world who can look that threatening when they're _kneeling?_

He frowns. He is tired. He doesn’t want to have this talk now, but it needs to happen.

“Why did you come back for me instead of going back to the base?” he says. The question comes out calmer than he'd expected. The drugs have still taken the edge off the anger he would usually be able to muster: he can’t work up more than curiosity.

Silence for a moment. “I heard gunshots.”

“Why the fuck were you close enough to hear gunshots? I told you to get back to _this base_.”

“We stopped down the road in case you needed help.”

For fuck’s sake. The soldier must know that Rumlow already knows this, and that it doesn’t actually explain anything. Rumlow changes his posture, straightening up a little bit in a way an outside observer would barely notice. The soldier notices, though, and drops his eyes to the floor. Rumlow says: “Why?”

The soldier keeps his eyes down, but doesn’t answer.

“Why?” Rumlow says again, and when that has no effect— “For fuck's sake, soldier, give me a _reason_.”

What he really means is _at least throw me a bone and make something up_. _Say you want to wait out the weather, say you did a calculation in your head and decided that an accident with the commander was theoretically more probable than a problem with the prisoners in the vehicle. Say you fucking forgot something at the compound. Just say something, because I am way too tired to punish you._

No answer. Of _course_ he won’t make something up, because the soldier doesn’t lie. The closest he ever comes to lying is being silent, like this, when he doesn’t know the answer to something or when he thinks that the answer will get him in trouble. Rumlow doesn’t know if it’s something the Russians trained into him or something he’s thought up by himself, but it’s fucking infuriating.

Rumlow lets out a breath, closes his eyes so he doesn't have to look at that stupid pouty face. He needs to be angry about the soldier’s behavior today. He needs to do something about it right now. He needs to—

But holding on to that thought is too slippery: just the thought of dredging up enough energy to chastise the soldier is exhausting. He keeps his eyes closed for a moment longer: the dark is comforting, even though it had been dark before and he had been so cold, is still so cold…

No, he won't punish him now. It can happen later, when Rumlow doesn't feel like he's just run a marathon on a broken leg. He opens his eyes. “See if there’s some food in my bag, will you?” he says.

The soldier gets up and starts looking through the bag, and Rumlow begins on peeling off the other parts of his sliced-up jacket. It’s not doing anything to keep him warm anyway. His upper body is not painful, not yet, but there’s a faint ache that hints that much worse is coming. He has no idea what his face looks like, but from the way Hennessy had reacted when he'd seen him downstairs, it’s probably not good.

The soldier hands him one of the high-calorie energy bars that were left in the bag. Produces a bottle of water from somewhere as well, although he hadn’t asked. Rumlow eats, and the food tastes much better than it should. He’s still hungry, but the painkillers will make keeping more down difficult, so he just drinks a bit of the water and stops there.

The soldier is still hovering after he is done.

“What do you want now?”

The soldier just looks at him, expectant. Rumlow shifts his weight on the mattress experimentally, hearing the sole of one boot squeak on the wooden floor as he repositions himself. A deeper cold is already sinking in over his upper body where the jacket had been. Yeah, he can do this now.

“Okay,” Rumlow says, “get down.”

The soldier is down on the floor in an instant, hands reaching for Rumlow’s pants and undoing them like this is something he’s been waiting for all day. His face is still close to expressionless, but somehow he still manages to look more enthusiastic about undoing a man's fly than a grand-an-hour hooker. He has been like that lately. God knows what’s going on in that fucked-up brain, but apparently at some point sucking cock had become the highlight of his existence, and it’s—kind of pitiable, actually, but right now it means skin contact and warmth and that’s—actually way better than the prospect of an orgasm.

Rumlow widens his legs as much as he comfortably can to avoid any contact with his damaged thigh, while the soldier pulls him out of his clothing with his flesh hand—yes, like he'd thought, so warm—and his mouth is closing over the head, the calluses on the soldier’s palm rubbing eagerly against the dry skin of his cock in a way that would probably hurt if he could feel pain right now.

“Hey. Easy,” Rumlow says.

The soldier looks up, freezing for a second, but then slows his movements, and far away Rumlow knows that he should already have shut this down altogether. Blowjobs like this are a reward: he established that a long time ago. Using your hands is a _reward_. The soldier had earned the opposite of a reward.

Rumlow exhales, leans down, takes him by the hair. “You haven’t been good today. You—” But the soldier just looks up at him, and Rumlow _swears_ he is still glaring, seriously looking up at him and pouting like he’s a sullen teenager, and Rumlow just doesn’t have the energy right now.

And—god, he’d been so cold back there. He is still—

He lets go of the soldier's hair and says “watch the leg” and the soldier does. His metal hand is resting on Rumlow's upper thigh, carefully avoiding any piece of damaged skin and holding the leg steady so that it doesn't get accidentally jostled. He takes Rumlow down deep enough to get most of the shaft wet with spit, then pulls back, rubbing up and down from the base of Rumlow's cock with the human hand, and it's slippery with spit now and the soldier's hand is almost as warm as his mouth.

Rumlow stays still, lets him do all the work: he is too tired to put effort into it himself tonight. The first couple of times he’d been alone at night with the soldier, Rumlow had been so into the novelty of it all that he’d fucked the soldier’s mouth up against the edge of a bed so hard that his head hitting against it had made the whole frame thump against the wall. That was probably what had started the rumors. (That and the time one of the cryo nerds had walked in on them while Rumlow was taking a break with the soldier in one of the labs. He really should have gotten around to killing that guy.)

Back then the soldier had just taken it all, every one of the most creatively degrading things Rumlow could think of, with a weird sort of far-away indifference; even afterwards, the strongest reaction Rumlow had ever caught on his face was confusion, as if he was remembering a strange dream he’d had the night before.

But now—now…

He takes hold of the soldier’s hair again, pulls his head back until his dick slides out past the soldier's wet lips, enjoying the momentary surprised look that flashes over the other man's face. A little drop of saliva falls to the floor right in front of where the soldier is kneeling, and the sight of it makes Rumlow shiver. He still has his hand twisted in his hair, so the soldier doesn’t move to take Rumlow's cock back in, just looks up at him, attentive. The spit is drying on Rumlow’s skin and it’s almost painful to be away from the heat of that mouth, but right now seeing the reactions on the soldier’s face is more interesting. Rumlow uses his free hand to stroke down the soldier’s face, pinches his lower lip a bit. Tightens his grip there, squeezing down, and the soldier makes a whining noise in his throat.

Rumlow’s index finger and thumb are wet with spit when he lets go, and he lifts his hand, brings the fingers up to his own mouth.

The soldier watches, silent, mouth still open slightly, lower lip shiny with saliva. Rumlow pushes his fingers back in, digging them deeper into the soldier’s mouth, brings them up dripping wet to his own again. He can’t help it, it just seems—

Doesn’t matter. He pulls forward on the soldier’s hair, gentler this time, and can’t help a deep shudder as the warmth swallows him back up. The soldier is still looking up at him, expressionless but his eyes piercing, and Rumlow has to break the eye contact to stop the feeling collecting in his chest.

He is warmer now. The soldier's mouth and hand move back and forth, steady as a heartbeat. Rumlow keeps his gaze directed somewhere past the soldier’s face now, to the wooden floor next to him. This view makes it impossible not to notice that the soldier is hard too, straining against the fabric of his pants. Rumlow bites his lip: he has the sudden image of seeing the soldier trying to get himself off too, down on his knees like this with his dick out and with Rumlow just watching until the end. But that’s just fucked up.

He doesn’t stop thinking it, though, and hears a low noise come out of his throat that he can’t stop.

“That’s good,” he says, and he shouldn’t praise the soldier now, but that’s far away. He grips the soldier's hair tighter, pulls him closer, hears himself moan. He doesn’t try to hold himself back, drag it out like he usually would: he wants this over, wants to feel it now. He can't help moving as he gives in to the rush that's coming, and the new pain in his leg is far away too, as are the noises coming from his own mouth. Fuck anyone hearing: everybody already knows anyway. The soldier gags a little, but he’s still looking at him—those eyes—

He thrusts forward, and then again and again. The soldier’s mouth is around him, tight and safe.

Rumlow gives a final weak thrust, gasping. There’s sweat on his forehead, on the back of his neck, and he is weak and shivering.

The soldier stares up at him, still holding eye contact. Rumlow pulls back out of his mouth, and sees the soldier’s neck move as he swallows what he’d left there.

 _"God,"_ Rumlow says out loud, before he can stop himself.

His hand shakes a little bit as he lets go of the soldier’s hair, and he looks away, keeps his eyes averted as he shoves himself back into his underwear. He’s already feeling cold again, the sweat too cool on his body.

“Out of my way,” he says finally, and when the soldier doesn’t move right away he jabs at his stomach with the toe of his boot. The soldier shuffles back, and Rumlow reaches down. He’s exhausted now, and he needs to get his boots off so he can crash down on the bed.

The soldier watches him, still kneeling on the floor. His face is red and still smeared with saliva, his hair is messed up, mouth swollen, but he looks like he’s forgotten about all of that already, and his erection has already subsided. He’s just staring at Rumlow trying to get off his shoe like it literally hurts him not to help. He actually sees the soldier's hand twitch.

Rumlow ignores him, but even with the drugs blocking most of the pain, it’s hard to get the correct angle to undo his laces with two hands without pressing into hot agony against his thigh. The soldier looks like he is physically holding himself back, and—

“Fucking _okay_ ,” Rumlow says. “You can help,” and he’s on him with a second.

The soldier removes his boots, and his socks, his ruined pants and the underwear underneath, and then stands up to help with the rest. Rumlow doesn’t have the energy to be embarrassed at his own helplessness. His skin is bare and he is cold, not just the cold of new air on skin; he is _cold_ again with something that seems to have eaten into him too deep. That’s the only reason he does what he does next: because he is cold.

“Soldier, he says, “would you like to sleep in the bed?”

He isn’t sure what reaction he expects. In fact, he hadn’t expected to say it at all. It just comes out, from a weird post-orgasm thing, or because the Russian drugs are still fucking with his brain.

The soldier had been kneeling down again to collect all of Rumlow’s discarded clothing. Now he looks up, face blank, as if he hadn’t heard him. No wonder: usually he sleeps beside the bed, if he is not on guard duty.

“Answer me. Do you want to sleep up here tonight?”

He blinks and nods, frowning slightly now, like he isn’t sure he understands.

Well, he can do it or not do it. Rumlow pulls the covers back and lies down on the uncomfortably cold sheet, but his new horizontal position is worth the momentary unpleasant pull on his leg. The soldier stands silently, goes to the foot of the bed. And then tries to climb on from there.

“Take your boots off, you idiot. Don’t just lie down fully clothed!”

The soldier pauses, confused, and looks at the door. He isn’t supposed to be barefoot on missions, even when he is not dressed for battle.

“Someone else is on watch tonight. We don’t trust you here with the Russians. Take your fucking clothes off.”

The soldier does it, first his boots and then the other pieces of clothing, folding it all excessively neatly and laying on the floor at the foot of the bed, next to Rumlow’s bag. He strips off the weapons he’d still been carrying: the ankle holster and gun, another knife on his thigh. He pulls a small knife from somewhere that Rumlow swears is _inside_ his metal arm, or hidden on it somewhere, but who knows. Rumlow is too distracted to care much: something about the soldier’s breathing is weird as he is doing this. Just slightly too fast, as if he’s just run a long distance, except as far as Rumlow knows the soldier is not actually _capable_ of being out of breath.

The soldier hooks his hands into his underwear to pull it down and Rumlow says: “Stop there. For fuck’s sake, no one’s interested in seeing that.”

The soldier stops and then waits, unmoving, not having been told what to do from here. It’s pathetic, and although it’s also sometimes kind of fun to order him around like this, he is too tired and cold. He just says: “Okay. Get in.”

The soldier moves, and Rumlow looks up at the ceiling as the mattress shifts and creaks under his weight. There is barely enough room on the narrow bed for two people, but he manages to squeeze in between Rumlow’s right side and the wall. Rumlow finds the switch for the light panel above the bed and turns it off, lies down on his back. Next to him, the soldier’s breathing is still weird, too quick. He can _feel_ it now as well as hear it, and the soldier is hiding it, has been trying to cover it up, but he is—

—he is _panting_ , like he’s overcome with excitement.

Fucking hell. What has he done?

He is in a bed with what is essentially a very dangerous attack animal, one that’s acting like a dog who’s just been told it’s about to go on the best walk of its life. Clearly Rumlow’s higher brain functions are not working right now, and maybe the doctors had underestimated the severity of the concussion.

He’s realized his error now, though, and he should kick out the soldier and send him back to the floor. He _will do that_ , but not now, because heat is fucking  _emanating_  from the man next to him. It’s almost as good as a hot shower, except without having to stand up. If only he wasn’t _panting_ …

Rumlow goes to side-eye the other man now that his eyes are adjusting to the dark. The soldier is on his side, facing toward him, and although he has managed to wedge himself in such a way that they are not touching, it's only barely, close enough to smell soap and new sweat on the other man's skin. The soldier is avoiding eye contact now, looking down toward the foot of the bed. But as Rumlow watches, he moves his hand—the right hand, the human hand—forward, half an inch, as if he is asking for permission.

“Yes,” Rumlow says, and it’s just because he’s cold.

The soldier moves the hand closer, hesitant, and Rumlow watches him do it with something between fascination and horror, the way you might watch an antelope on a nature show trying and failing to escape a lion. The hand moves forward until it comes to rest on Rumlow’s bare abdomen. It touches the skin there lightly, without putting any weight into the touch, as if the soldier is prepared to pull back, but when Rumlow doesn’t move the hand settles, the weight becoming more natural. His skin still feels as warm as it had on his leg right after the cold and the snow. Rumlow holds back a shiver at the temperature change.

The soldier is visibly trembling now, still breathing just a little too fast, and when he moves his hand downward, toward Rumlow's hip, Rumlow thinks that maybe this is some astoundingly dumb _seduction_ attempt, and that he’s going to have to really teach the soldier a lesson if he thinks—

But the hand stops there, under his belly button, and strokes back upwards to his chest. Down, then up again. Stroking his belly, up and down, like Rumlow is a cat.

The soldier just wants to touch him.

Jesus.

He is gazing openly at Rumlow’s face now, and he is clearly attempting to keep his own face neutral, but there is nothing the soldier can do to hide the sheer _happiness_ that is radiating off him. His whole body is vibrating with pure fucking ecstatic joy. It’s not sexual at all—that would actually be _less_ weird. He touches Rumlow like a father touching the skin of his firstborn child. He touches him like you might stroke the letter you just received pardoning you from an execution.

Rumlow has witnessed grown men cry as they beg for their lives in vain. He has seen men shit themselves while bleeding out from their injuries. And this? _This is the most pathetic thing that he has ever seen_.

He doesn’t know what to do, though, so he doesn’t move. This was clearly an awful decision but—he is tired. It’s warm. There’s always tomorrow to deal with it. He lies still, and the other man’s breathing calms down to normal, finally, but the trembling doesn’t stop. He keeps stroking Rumlow like that, up and down, and Rumlow just closes his eyes and lets him.

Finally, after about ten minutes, Rumlow says: “Stop moving like that, I need to sleep.”

The hand stops, tension in it like the soldier is waiting to be told to move back, to go back to the floor, to go outside.

Rumlow doesn’t speak, though, and when he’s already half-asleep he becomes vaguely aware that the soldier is no longer tense, and that he is speaking to him, voice low and conspiratorial and designed not to wake.

 _Cold_ , the soldier says, _I’m sorry you were cold,_ and then Rumlow is asleep.

 

* * *

 

He has only only a vague memory of shifting a few times in the night, and _warmth_ , a lot of deep comforting warmth that is still with him when he wakes. The clock on the wall above the armchair says 5:30 when he cracks open his eyes just long enough to see, and he is stunned it has been that long, because now he is in _so much pain_.

There’s no way _every part of his body_ could have impacted when the vehicle crashed, but apparently somehow it had. Dull pain all over: a deeper, itching pain deep in his leg. It even hurts to breathe.

He opens his eyes fully. He’s lying on his left side. He has never slept well on his back, so it’s not surprising that he’d move onto his side, but there’s something heavy on him, as well, like—

An arm.

The soldier’s flesh arm is slung over him. The other man is asleep, still, the top part of his chest pressed against Rumlow's back.

Christ. He had almost forgotten.

Rumlow draws in a breath. At least the rest of the other man’s body isn’t touching him: his hips and abdomen are, from what he can tell, separated by a couple of inches from Rumlow's back. The soldier seems to be making his best effort, even in his sleep, to only touch him with the appendage that Rumlow had given him permission to touch him with last night. Thank fuck for that: he isn’t going to find out whether the soldier’s circulatory system is in optimal shape this morning.

Waking up with regrets is something that has happened a lot in his life. But this—this is a more extreme fuckup than can be tolerated, even if his brain is still too fuzzy to articulate exactly why. He has to get out of this, _quickly_.

He resists the urge to just elbow the soldier violently in the ribs: moving will hurt too much. “Soldier,” he says instead, quietly but firmly. “Move and stop touching me.”

The soldier had either not been asleep after all, or wakes up at the sound of his voice: the arm, and the warmth against his upper back, withdraws in an instant.

“Don’t say a word,” Rumlow says as he sits up. “Not a word. Wait until I’m gone and then get dressed, for fuck’s sake.”

Silence behind him, but he assumes that the soldier has nodded. Rumlow isn’t going to look at him, so he can’t tell. He sits up. It hurts. He needs to piss, too. He finds new clothes in the bag and puts them on, slowly, gritting his teeth, hating everything. He catches a look at his leg as he pulls up a new pair of pants over it: the patches of skin not covered by gauze have bruised a black-green color he didn’t know skin could go.

He finds a thinner jacket that will do almost as well as the one that got cut up, slides it on. Finishes dressing,  _finally_ , faster than he should be able to in this much pain because he needs to _get out._  By the time he is done with his boots he is sweaty and breathless from the pain. He needs to stop and take a few deep breaths until the agony in his leg has faded to the point that he can see again. He reaches the door after an age, and he must still be somewhat fucked up in the head, because he glances back at the bed.

The soldier is sitting up. He is looking up at Rumlow with the same blank expression as always, but he doesn’t seem to be glaring anymore.

Rumlow looks away, and leaves the room.

After his experience putting on the boots, walking is easy, although he has to stop for a minute again once he gets to the bathroom at the end of the hall, and again when he reaches the sink after relieving himself. He washes his hands at the sink in the empty bathroom—even _that_ hurts—and waits to catch his breath yet again. It takes him longer to do it, this time, but it’s all right because he is out of that room and that bed, and now he has time to think about how fucked he is.

He should have nipped whatever insane shit the soldier had going in the bud, right after he had first disobeyed yesterday. Instead he’d—he’d given him a _reward_ , he’d messed up what the soldier expected from him, and if the soldier malfunctions after this and Rumlow gets the blame—well, it would have been better if he’d died out there in the snow. HYDRA does not have time for someone in his position who can’t control their asset.

And more than that, worse than facing a shot to the head and an anonymous burial, _even worse than that_ , Rumlow had—he’d—

He turns on the faucet again, loud. He washes his face, rinses out his mouth a few times, washes his face again. He wants to punch something: a wall, a face. But it hurts too much to move. He just stands there in the bathroom, hands balled in fists and his leg hurting like it wants to kill him.

He lets out a long breath that comes out as an echoing hiss in the empty tiled room. He has to make this _right_ , sooner rather than later.

He can’t reverse what happened, can’t undo his betrayal of HYDRA and his personal failures, but he can do his best to get everything close enough to normal again.

He doesn’t go back to the room with his stuff in it. Instead, he slowly and painfully makes his way downstairs. When he nears the bottom of the stairs he straightens up a little, tries to hide the worst of his limp.

Innes is on duty still, like he’d thought. Good. The kid has managed to procure a chair, and is sitting next to the table by the entrance. He has a pocketknife in his right hand and is carving notches in the wood of the table’s edge, a bored expression on his face. He startles and jumps to his feet when he sees Rumlow, almost cutting his hand open in his rush to get the knife out of sight.

Rumlow pretends not to notice. “Innes,” he says. “You on watch for much longer?” He already knows the answer. He also knows that unlike him, Innes is currently blessed with a full range of motion, and that he is probably as imaginative as Rumlow himself, if not more so.

“Almost done, sir,” Innes answers. “Fifteen minutes.” Polite again, unfailingly polite, like he hadn't been looking at them in the vehicle yesterday like a starving man watching a feast.

“I’ll take over for the rest of your shift,” Rumlow says. “I’m up anyway.”

“Sir?” The kid is confused, waiting for the catch.

Rumlow forces his face into an approximation of a friendly smile, and even that hurts. “You did well yesterday, and followed orders,” he says. “You deserve a reward.” 

Innes nods, clearly still confused.

Rumlow moves past him, sits down stiffly in the chair Innes had vacated. It hurts his shoulders to do it, but he forces a casual shrug, as if he's making an impartial decision. "Go upstairs, room 3. The soldier is in there. Be sure to tell him I sent you, you'll be safe if you do that. I’ll come up and join you both once your relief turns up.”

The other man pauses. The meaning of what Rumlow is saying seems to take a moment to sink in. When it does, all at once, he smiles like a neighborhood bully who has woken up on Christmas morning to find a rifle under the tree.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, with more sincerity on his face than Rumlow has ever seen. He disappears up the stairs, and Rumlow settles back into the chair.

He sits and waits, and puts his hands deep into his jacket pockets. He’s cold again.

 

 

 


End file.
